Featured places
Mosques, caravanserais, souks, museums — and why they are worth the walk.
813 Places
Tell Mozan
Urkesh, the holy city of the Hurrians, west of Qamishli. Its queen sealed more doors than its king, and beside the palace lies a shaft into the underworld.
Qamishli · Akkadian — Hurrian — Mitanni
Tell Leilan
Shubat-Enlil, the capital of Shamshi-Adad. In the cut face of the mound lies a band of soil with no trace of settlement in it: three centuries of drought.
Qamishli · Akkadian — Old Babylonian
Tell Halaf
A whole prehistoric culture is named after this village. The sculptures of Aramaean Guzana shattered in a fire in Berlin and were rebuilt from the fragments.
Hasakah · Halaf culture — Aramaean — Assyrian
Tell Brak
One of the earliest known cities anywhere: ancient Nagar. On a mound north-east of Hasakah the plan of a five-thousand-year-old city still reads on the ground.
Hasakah · Late Chalcolithic — Akkadian — Mitanni
Tell Beydar
Ancient Nabada: a mound north of Hasakah drawn onto the plain as two concentric rings. A fifty-room palace on top, and an archive of tablets counting sheep.
Hasakah · Early Dynastic — Akkadian — Hellenistic
The Syrian Military Museum
Opened in 1959 in the west wing of the Tekkiye complex in Damascus. Its halls, the fighter jets parked in the garden, the space capsule, and the doubt since 2011.
Damascus · Ottoman building — a museum since 1959
Souq Wadi Barada
The site of ancient Abila, in the narrowest gorge of the Barada valley. A Roman road cut into the cliff, the Latin tablets above it, and rock-cut tombs.
Zabadani · Roman — the road and its tablets, 2nd century
Slunfeh, the Mountain Resort Above Latakia
A mountain town 50 kilometres east of Latakia, at 1130 metres, among oak, fir and cedar forest. It is the best known and busiest summer retreat in Syria.
Latakia · Modern hill resort
Serghaya
A border town at 1446 metres, 12 kilometres north of Zabadani. Apple and cherry orchards, and the last stop on the narrow-gauge line that came up from Beirut.
Zabadani · —
Salamiyah
A city on the edge of the steppe south-east of Hama: the birthplace of the Fatimid caliphate, the largest Ismaili centre in the Arab world, and Shmemis castle.
Hama · Byzantine — Ottoman
The Al-Saffahiyah Mosque, Aleppo
A Mamluk mosque and madrasa founded in 1425 by the judge Ibn al-Saffah, in al-Jalloum. Known for the carved octagonal minaret rising off its stone portal.
Aleppo · Mamluk (the sultanate that ruled Syria from Cairo)
The Damascus Historical Museum
A museum in an 18th-century Damascene house in Souq Saruja. Its ablaq courtyard, the painted wooden frieze, the city’s documents, and almost no visitors.
Damascus · Ottoman — a museum since 1979
